


A Ruined Fate

by Bucket_head



Category: Super Mario & Related Fandoms
Genre: Angst, Bowser (mentioned) - Freeform, Grief/Mourning, Multi, Peach (mentioned) - Freeform, Peasley (mentioned), Post-Apocalypse, Written in a day, mentioned relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-18
Updated: 2020-05-18
Packaged: 2021-03-03 01:35:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,003
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24246622
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bucket_head/pseuds/Bucket_head
Summary: Luigi reflects as him and his brother wander what's remaining of their dead world.
Relationships: Luigi & Mario (Nintendo)
Comments: 1
Kudos: 44





	A Ruined Fate

The world had ended.

Every kingdom. Every civilization. Every race. They’d ceased to be.

Luigi hasn’t seen another soul in two years, save his brother. They wander together, aimlessly, across the ever deteriorating landscape. Luigi has long since given up jumping at every shadow. There was nothing left to hurt him. No enemies, no monsters, no demons. Even the boos, his nightmare, had vanished. In a twisted way his life long wish had been granted. He wasn’t scared of anything anymore.

Mario talked more now then he ever had when there had been others to listen. He told stories, about adventures he’d had, about the days they used to spend with their friends, about the secrets once told to him by others. Mario talked and talked and talked because if he didn’t nothing left on this world would make a sound. Water didn’t flow. Just pooled in muddy pits and dead lakes. Rain didn’t fall, as the last vestiges of plants withered and died. Bugs had disappeared some eight months ago, and no longer was the gorgeous starry night filled with their songs. 

Luigi tried to sing, sometimes. Time wavers in his perception, so he keeps a calendar in the form of a slab of tallies and measures by sunrise. The last time he sung was a week and a half ago. He sang lullabies and stupid pop songs and classic tunes, whatever he could remember. He sang until his voice was hoarse and Mario had fallen asleep with a hand on his knee.

Mario doesn’t sleep much, anymore. He talks too much. Thinks too much. It’s rare for him to fully shut down, and only if Luigi is in his grip. Only if the younger man is speaking or singing or breathing loud enough.

It took too much time for Luigi to realize why. That Mario’s terrified when he opens his eyes, Luigi will have vanished like the rest of the life in the world.

They’ve been walking the remnants of this cross country road for thirteen weeks, sustaining on scavenged tins and occasionally stripping riverbanks clean of anything edible. It’s barely enough. Sometimes it isn’t enough, and Mario will forfeit his portion for Luigi eat until they luck into a new abandoned shop or a still viable farm plot. They can’t live like that forever. That’s the one thing Mario won’t talk about.

There’s no destination. The closest thing to direction they’ll take is turning to any indication of ruins. More empty homes to raid. More preserved food. A little more time. Every day, struggling for just a little more time.

Mario talks about Peach. That he loved her. That she loved him. He talks about her hands in his hair and her kind smile. Her intricate cakes and her muted love of sports and competition. He doesn’t regret never telling her his feelings aloud, doesn’t regret they never made love, never married. The only thing he does regret is he wasn’t there, as the last of her kingdom crumbled and she left the world behind. Luigi can’t help but think how innocent the man is. Even now.

Mario talks about Bowser. Their fights, yes, but their calm moments too. When they stood silently together in the wings waiting for a match at tennis. When they watched each other from across the room, with equal distrust and interest. When the occasional harsh word they spat at one another cooled to banter, how much Mario looked forward to those times. Luigi’s briefly wondered if there’s an aspect to his brother’s sexuality the man never had a chance to explore, but something like that is irrelevant now. There is no Bowser, and there is no Peach. There’s no one left to love. 

When Mario talks about Peasley, Luigi remains silent. Mario shares their occasional meetings. Mentions his hair flicks and the sharp twinkle in the man’s eyes. Luigi listens and remembers. He doesn’t share his own moments with the prince. The man’s pale green hands on his body, the touch of lips to his. Words whispering praise of his heroics, self-proclamations of being seduced, wholly and completely by the Italian. The slight hiccup in his laugh he’d hide from others. 

Luigi regrets…no. Luigi doesn’t regret any part of that. There’s no point in regretting. It was his choice not to leave for the bean kingdom at the start of it all. He still has a photo of the man hidden somewhere in his pocket, ripped out of a half-rot newspaper he found, announcing the prince’s eternal disappearance from the world. Knowing was enough, somehow. It was more than Mario had for Bowser. More then either had for Wario or Waluigi or Yoshi or just about anyone else. Not having to hope…it was easier.

The intermittent food has started taking a toll. Mario is weaker then him now. Can’t run as fast. Can’t jump like he used to. At some point the man injured his wrist, and since then he’s never been able to carry things heavier than ten pounds with his left arm. Luigi can feel himself slowing down, too. He’s used to hunger now. The ever present gnaw in his gut. They eat on a schedule. Wake at sunrise. Eat. Wait until the sun is three hand widths into the sky. Eat. Sunset. Eat. And in-between they walk.

Across the dry tundra. Desert. Mountains. Fire scorched forests. Toxic wetlands. Gaping canyons.

Mario talks about plumbing, a thing he’d never wanted to do in the first place. Mario talks about heaven, and Luigi isn’t sure if he believes in it or not. Mario talks about Luigi’s old violin, a ratty thing he’d abandoned when he realized it wasn’t worth it’s weight. Mario talks about their parents, in half baked tales Luigi is certain are imagined. 

Mario talks about jumping, when they come across a landscape of rotting mushrooms and bottomless pits.

They find a town. Across eighteen houses they scavenge exactly two cans, and one bottle of purified water. They stay in one of the mostly intact buildings through the night. Mario doesn’t sleep but for an hour, maybe two, head pressed into Luigi’s shoulder and hands gripped like cuffs on his arms. Luigi sleeps like the dead.

There’s a gravesite near. Mario stops there before they leave, weaving dead grass into necklaces and draping them over the mounds. He tells the buried copses thank you’s for letting them stay the night. It’s a waste of time when they have so little supplies. Luigi doesn’t say that, doesn’t stop him. If it brings the man a bit of peace then it’s enough.

Mario talks about being a hero. About saving the helpless and protecting the weak. That it was something he had been born for. Luigi agrees with that. That’s the difference that sets them apart, always had been. Mario has been born for it. Fate. It was his fate to be a hero, to stand up for his morals and protect both those he loved and those he pitied. 

Luigi wasn’t a hero. He was someone who blew through life, struggling for his own identity. He hadn’t been born for a purpose. In a way, between them, Luigi was the one with true free will. Always able to back out, to move on, to decide his path for himself and reshape his life. In this world, that’s just as meaningless as an uncompletable fate. When all they can do is survive, choice and destiny no longer apply.

Mario talks about disappearing. Only once. When they’ve stumbled across an abandoned suitcase of canned vegetables on a road that stretches forever in each direction. He opens a tin and huddles around it with Luigi, fork never moving as Luigi devours the can, and he mentions he might vanish. Luigi takes him in a trembling embrace and promises when it comes, they’ll vanish together. Mario asks him to sing and he does, until his throat is raw and bleeding. Mario sleeps well for the first time in years. 

They take turns lugging the suitcase along with them. After a day Luigi takes the time to shave off the leather on the outside of the suitcase. It lowers the weight but makes it vulnerable to the air. When the container starts falling apart Luigi shovels the remaining cans into his sack. The terrain has changed again. The outskirts of a city, or it used to be. Neither are sure what kingdom or provenience it is at first, not until they’ve hiked though three days of toppled skyscrapers and broken concrete. Luigi finds a stuffed gorilla in a tiny pink backpack as he searches for supplies. He doesn’t share it, just shoves it back inside and back under the rubble.

Mario talks about the stars. They truly are magnificent. Every night they’re brighter and brighter, no longer drowned out by the light of civilization. There’s no Milky Way – but there never was in this world. It’s…something else. Just a spattering of diamonds in every corner of the sky. Mario points them out to him. Tells some names and constellations. Luigi notices he’s contradicting himself, mixing the titles together and gesturing at random. When he wakes in the morning Mario hasn’t moved from the spot, eyes glazed and staring across the horizon.

The older man boils the murky water they find in pools across the cement. The taste of it doesn’t register anymore. As long as it’s edible they ingest it without thought. Mario is eating less, even as they find another small catch of tins. For the first time Luigi has to remind him. Then force him. The older man says he wants to save it for the trip once they leave the city. From the look on his face Luigi can’t tell if that’s a lie. He lets Mario get away with just a quarter of the can.

Once through the city they pass through a countryside. Unused farms. Empty houses. Graves. Enough that Luigi has to physically stop Mario from mourning them just to make more than a measly three miles distance a day. Mario talks about Daisy. Mario talks about Toadette. Mario talks about Vivian. Mario talks about Peach. Mario talks about Bowser. Mario talks about Luigi, as if he’s no longer beside him.

Luigi hasn’t seen another soul in three years, save his brother. Mario talks, babbles constantly. He babbles about the people he’s lost, the life that was taken from him, the things he couldn’t protect. He babbles about anything that passes in his head. Stories fictional and true melting to one stream of consciousness. Luigi takes him by the hand and guides him across the landscape, listening to it – the last sounds left in this dying world. He coaxes the man to eat, helps him drink, watches over him while he blindly prays to nameless graves and talks to people who are no longer able to listen.

Luigi wonders if this is natural. The result of a man’s fate interrupted. If the death of this world wasn’t meant to be, if Mario was meant somehow to put a stop to it. If the contradiction of fate and reality drove him mad. Maybe that’s why Luigi was so calm, when there was nothing else to live for. No one else to love, but his brother. Because he never had that tie to fate Mario had been born with. Peasley, Peach, Bowser, all meant to rule this world and all torn from it. Hundreds of races, billions of people. Vanished.

Was that because of a ruined fate, or had that been fate itself?

Mario kisses his cheek one night, eyes locking to his with a sudden clarity Luigi can’t fathom. Mario tells him he loves him. Asks him to sing. In that moment Luigi knows. He takes Mario close in his arms and sings him to sleep. 

The sun rises on the dead world. When Luigi wakes his arms are empty. Mario has vanished, and Luigi is truly, completely alone.


End file.
